"Your best move is to curl up into a ball and wait for help."

Slate's advice on how to survive a kangaroo attack is here.  I hope this advice is better than Slate's predictions on Supreme Court rulings.

Things you know exist but do not actually know.

From time to time a person makes the news for holding some kind of record that I did not realize existed.  However, if I think about the particular record, I realize that there has to be someone who is the record holder.  After all, someone was the tallest person.

Tommy Thompson can do more push-ups than you.

Former Wisconsin governor Tommy Thompson is running for the Wisconsin's United States Senate seat.  I tend to doubt that he will win the Republican nomination because Republicans today really are not interested in furthering the ambitions of career politicians.  Also Governor Thompson is a well-known advocate of government spending money on trains and Wisconsin republicans no longer like trains.

However, I am pretty sure that Governor Thompson can out push-up any of his opponents in the election.  The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel has footage of Governor Thompson dropping and doing 50 push-ups at a reporter's request.  The footage is here.  The story notes that Governor Thompson placed his feat against the wall to get some support.  However, anecdotal evidence (in the form of me doing push-ups with my feet against a wall and not against a wall) suggests that the benefit derived from the wall is less than 10 percent.  At a minimum, Governor Thompson can do 45 unaided push-ups.

To put this in perspective, Governor Thompson, at the age of 70, can do almost double the average number push-ups a 40-year-old man can do according to Livestrong.com.  If fitness in elected officials is important to you, than maybe Governor Thompson deserves your vote.

People with nothing better to do.

A couple weeks ago we posted on the punishment Penn State received from the NCAA.  This was punishment that Penn State agreed to.  Nevertheless, ESPN reports that former Penn State football players are appealing the punishment.  The letter from the player's lawyers notifying the NCAA of the appeal is here.

“Vegetables are healthy. Don’t judge me.”

If the fastest person in the world wants to eat McDonald's, I will not judge him.  If you are not reading Joe Posnanski's blog about the Olympics, you should correct that mistake.

Ninth Circuit to Senate: It is your fault.

Back in May, we posted about how the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit was not going to let a couple of senators push them around about where the Ninth Circuit decided to have a judicial conference. When the senators asked about the costs associated with having a conference in Maui, the Ninth Circuit told them to buzz off.

21st Century Service

Every once in a while I get an idea. Here this year's:

Every business entity should be required to maintain a registered email address for receiving electronic service of process.

Ouch.

In a detailed discussion of the Seventh Circuit's opinion in Flava Works, Inc. v. Gunter, blogger Eric Goldman rips into Judge Posner and the Seventh Circuit:

Judge Posner drafted this opinion, which means that (as usual for him) it reads like a barely edited first-draft. As usual for Seventh Circuit opinions, it makes a number of questionable and undefended offline analogies, makes assumptions about factual questions that could/should be remanded to the district court, barely engages with or cites to other legal precedent, raises and addresses issues that the litigants never raised, and is filled with gratuitous digressions (e.g., an uncomfortable discussion that gay ethnic pornography might be illegal, a contention neither party advanced; and an odd discussion about the reputational capital benefits of sharing content). If I were Flava Works, I would be hopping mad about the manifest procedural defects in the opinion (and motivated to seek en banc review). As a result of the opinion’s characteristic affectations, parsing this opinion is needlessly difficult, so I can only do so much to deconstruct the legal principles in it.

For some more of Judge Posner's "characteristic affectations," see my post from earlier today about another opinion Judge Posner authored.

In fact, as long as I'm talking about that opinion, I was struck by Posner's assertion in that case that the court's willingness to interpret the limits of Illinois law depends on whether the case got to federal court because Plaintiff filed it there or because the defendant removed it there:

The plaintiffs are asking us to innovate boldly in the name of the Illinois courts, and such a request is better addressed to those courts than to a federal court. If the plaintiffs had filed this case in an Illinois state court and it had been removed to the federal district court, they would have had no choice, and then we would have been duty-bound to be as innovative as we thought it plausible to suppose the Illinois courts would be. But the plaintiffs filed this suit in the district court originally — they chose the federal forum.

Judge Posner cites a couple cases to support this idea that the Seventh Circuit is not "duty bound" to figure out what Illinois law requires when the Plaintiff chooses federal court as the forum, so maybe it's a well established principle. But that doesn't make it any less strange.

"Although it is well known that every human being defecates, no adult human being in our society wants a newspaper to show a picture of him defecating."

Speak for yourself, Judge Posner.

A sitting state supreme court justice lost a primary?

Remember when Texas Governor Rick Perry was considered to be a serious candidate for president? If not perhaps one of these links will refresh your recollection.